Spain definitely lost its world empire in 1898 after the defeat toward the United States army,

dedicating since then its colonial efforts exclusively to Equatorial Guinea and Morocco, in the African continent. But aside from the sorrow of the military disaster and the dislike against the United States for all the face and status lost in a time when ranking among nations was decided by square kilometres under their flag, it is neccesary to differentiate the cases of the caribbean colonies (Puerto Rico and, mainly, Cuba) and that of those in the Pacific (Micronesia and, mainly, the Philippines). Loss of power in Cuba meant the forced weakening of very strong ties between both territories, cultural as well as economic: the repatriation of capital was so important that many of the biggest banks in contemporary Spain were founded with money sent from Cuba at the turn of the century. The ties with the Philippines, on the other side, were not so strong and, more than that, it can be said that progressively surged a feeling in the Peninsula of being freed from a heavy burden: there had been no profits from such colonization and dominance in Manila was widely perceived to be the most inefficient and ruled by religious orders. "Souls" had been the only "benefit" of three hundred years of rule in the Philippines and even this argument could not be regarded very positively for an increasingly anticlerical intellectual thinking in Spain. After all, the United States had made a favour in the case of the Philippines and Micronesia, although not in relation to Cuba, the socalled Jewel of the Empire. It had been enough of adventuring in the Far East and since then it should be better to forget about all those territories; interest became exclusively exotic and shallow knowledge prevaile